Heaven bless you, my dear Father, and be quite sure that if I get into any trouble requiring a friend, it is to you I shall turn. As yet I have no other friend on earth, and with prudence and good luck I may escape the infliction of any other friend.
Yours ever affectionately,
KENELM.
P. S.—Dear Father, I open my letter in your library to say again “Bless you,” and to tell you how fondly I kissed your old beaver gloves, which I found on the table.
When Sir Peter came to that postscript he took off his spectacles and wiped them: they were very moist.
Then he fell into a profound meditation. Sir Peter was, as I have said, a learned man; he was also in some things a sensible man, and he had a strong sympathy with the humorous side of his son’s crotchety character. What was to be said to Lady Chillingly? That matron was quite guiltless of any crime which should deprive her of a husband’s confidence in a matter relating to her only son. She was a virtuous matron; morals irreproachable, manners dignified, and she-baronety. Any one seeing her for the first time would intuitively say, “Your ladyship.” Was this a matron to be suppressed in any well-ordered domestic circle? Sir Peter’s conscience loudly answered, “No;” but when, putting conscience into his pocket, he regarded the question at issue as a man of the world, Sir Peter felt that to communicate the contents of his son’s letter to Lady Chillingly would be the foolishest thing he could possibly do. Did she know that Kenelm had absconded with the family dignity invested in his very name, no marital authority short of such abuses of power as constitute the offence of cruelty in a wife’s action for divorce from social board and nuptial bed could prevent Lady Chillingly from summoning all the grooms, sending them in all directions with strict orders to bring back the runaway dead or alive; the walls would be placarded with hand-bills, “Strayed from his home,” etc.; the police would be telegraphing private instructions from town to town; the scandal would stick to Kenelm Chillingly for life, accompanied with vague hints of criminal propensities and insane hallucinations; he would be ever afterwards pointed out as “THE MAN WHO HAD DISAPPEARED.” And to disappear and to turn up again, instead of being murdered, is the most hateful thing a man can do: all the newspapers bark at him, “Tray, Blanche, Sweetheart, and all;” strict explanations of the unseemly fact of his safe existence are demanded in the name of public decorum, and no explanations are accepted; it is life saved, character lost.
Sir Peter seized his hat and walked forth, not to deliberate whether to fib or not to fib to the wife of his bosom, but to consider what kind of fib would the most quickly sink into the bosom of his wife.
A few turns to and fro on the terrace sufficed for the conception and maturing of the fib selected; a proof that Sir Peter was a practised fibber. He re-entered the house, passed into her ladyship’s habitual sitting-room, and said with careless gayety, “My old friend the Duke of Clareville is just setting off on a tour to Switzerland with his family. His youngest daughter, Lady Jane, is a pretty girl, and would not be a bad match for Kenelm.”
“Lady Jane, the youngest daughter with fair hair, whom I saw last as a very charming child, nursing a lovely doll presented to her by the Empress Eugenie,—a good match indeed for Kenelm.”
“I am glad you agree with me. Would it not be a favourable step towards that alliance, and an excellent thing for Kenelm generally, if he were to visit the Continent as one of the Duke’s travelling party?”
“Of course it would.”